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Coming soon: Our revamped website

For more than a year now, we've been working hard behind the scenes developing an easier-to-use website. While insurance industry professionals -- agents, brokers and insurers -- are familiar with navigating our site, testing showed that consumers could only complete site-related tasks about a third of the time. That's a problem, obviously, when a key part of our mission is informing and protecting consumers.

So we've revised the navigational structure of the site to make it a lot more intuitive. For years, for example, much of the navigational structure on the site simply mirrored the agency's organizational chart, rather than putting things where average users would expect them to be.

Along the way, we've repeatedly tested the changes on both consumers and industry professionals to make sure that we really are improving things, rather than just changing them.

The upshot: Successful task completion on the website for consumers, which is about 33 percent on our current website, rises to nearly 80 percent on our new prototype website, pictured below.

We're also changing the look and feel of the site to update it. The site isn't live yet, but we're expecting to make the change in mid-January.

There will inevitably be some hiccups and things we'll need to fix, but we think you'll like the new site better. And we know it will be easier to use.